Decyphering gear with Pawn

So clearly there was a pretty major change to the caster gear system with the introduction of Spell Power in patch 3.0. I didn’t worry about it too much at the time — with a month to go in TBC, gearing up was not a great concern, and I already had my +healing gear wishlist set.

Of course everything changed once we entered Northrend. Where once I felt pretty sure about my gearing decisions (if it has healing and spirit, it’s probably good!), suddenly the nuances made me nervous. Haste vs. crit. Int vs. spirit. And what separates mage gear from warlock gear from priest gear?

I like optimizing my gear and technique, but when people start pulling out math with elaborate Greek symbols and graphs my eyes start to cross. Fortunately there are people out there much smarter than I am who can help work this stuff out, in this case namely the clever person at A Dwarf Priest. I took their stat weights, and put them into the mod Pawn. Now when I look at the tooltip for gear there is a little number at the bottom labeled “Holy” with a figure based on my weighting system. It’s easy for me to see on the fly if something is an upgrade or not, and I don’t have to keep a raid waiting while I ponder haste vs. crit.

I’m still a little unsure about the spell power change, and I miss having my holy priest gear niche. Plus I just don’t feel I have a true handle on the current gear and stats. I’m willing to learn, though, with the help of a mod or two.